Problems of Game Design Learned Playing in "Easy" Mode

- by Leo Stableford, 24 July 2015

Recently I've been giving those other games a try. Not the terrible ones, not the great ones, the ones that people think they should get around to playing some time. Not always the ones termed "hidden gems," either.

The thing about me is, I'm a busy guy. When I play a game I need it to be of a sufficient quality to make it worth my while. I need it to engage me instantly. I need it to make its point, deliver some fun, and get out of my life. There are few epic gaming experiences that I can be bothered to plug through. Epic difficulty mode is something that happens to someone else.

Some of you may think that breezing through a game on "easy" mode is an attack on your gamer cred. If someone comes close to rage quitting on a game where odds are stacked in their favour, then either the game is broken or the gamer is. This is definitely true. I have learned to stop playing long before rage quitting is a possibility.

Part of that learning process is to understand how games can be broken in subtle, tiny ways. It is about embracing the fact that even easy games may have fundamental flaws.

There I am, playing away with the stabilisers on, doing my best to breeze through the story and something comes out of left field. Some tiny little design flaw I recognise from the days when there was no easy mode. The days when bad game design could be confused with the player just plain sucking.

So I thought it would be a good thing today to look at a few things that came up in my recent gaming experiences. The flaws in design that show up when the developers are trying to make the game into an funfair ride instead of an ordeal. Things that, if they disappeared tomorrow, would make life better for all gamers. Not just the stuff for ones wearing inflatable arm bands.

Ironically, the 2013 video game "Remember Me" thinks that its terrible combos are a cause for celebration. There are three "basic" combos: a three button one, a five button one and a seven button one. Each starts with a hard-coded button. After pressing this, the others can be swapped out in the "combo lab". The new buttons deliver benefits like extra power or health regeneration.

This would be fine and all, except that landing the five button combo is all but impossible. Forget about the seven button one. The timing is tuned to be ridiculously precise so the longer combos are pretty useless to you.

This got me to thinking. In what world is it fun to press a sequence of five buttons in a quick rhythm anyway? Having a punch button is fine. A kick button, also fine. Chaining triple punches or back-flip kicks in a series of two or three button combos is acceptable. But when you are pushing the limits of what a human brain can cope with in terms of sequencing for a lightweight combat adventure game? Forget it, Remember Me.

Multi-button fighting moves aren't just useless in this game. Every video game I've ever played with punching and kicking goes too far at some point. From Arkham City to God of War, each game shows you the button combo for some move and you end up thinking: "Well, I'm never going to do that".

There's the problem. Where the lesser combos are good enough, the complex ones are just left to rot, redundant design and development. When you need to master them you have a choice: go to finger torture academy and learn this stuff through trial and error or just give up. I can't be certain, but I bet most people just give up.

Not that Enslaved: Odyssey to the West doesn't have some dumb combat stuff in it. Most moves are executed with a single button. Or not executed because of insane timing requirements by another single button. So combos aren't a thing and the game flows better for that.

There was this one part, though, where you're flying on this little hoverboard thingie. It's pretty smooth, the hoverboard thing, you use it maybe five times in the whole game. Not enough to become bored of it, also not enough to get super good.

There's a section where you have to chase a big robot across a swamp filled with mines on this thing. You collide with one mine and it's back to the beginning. I found the sequence mildly irritating, not impossible, but still irritating. The chances of never hitting a mine first time out are slim to none.

I wouldn't have minded at all if the mines had just, you know, hurt a whole bunch. A mild warning followed by insta-death would have been fine. It was the fact that the only way to discover the collision rules on the mine were to activate them. You had to die and go all the way back to the beginning of the sequence.

It's not that the scene held me up for a long time, or that I felt it was badly constructed (I think it was, a bit, but not too much). It was just that once it was over, I never ever wanted to see that sequence again. It's not the first time this kind of thing has happened either.

In God of War there's a bit where you have to scale these massive rotating columns with blades sticking out of them. Getting hit by the blades doesn't kill you immediately, but it does send you plunging back down the cliff face. Those rotating columns were hard to beat, or at least I found them so. I gave up, rather than continue getting sliced and set back.

Sometimes the sense of achievement from beating something isn't about the satisfaction of winning. It's about knowing that you will never have to see that stupid section of the game ever again in your entire life. I would argue that inspiring that feeling in people is the opposite of designing something well.

Or "What the hell am I supposed to do now?" syndrome. Silent Hill 2 was famous for leaving people hanging a couple of times. Its not alone, though. There are many games where players get to a certain point and get stuck. It could be a room that looks like a dead end or a boss fight against something that appears invulnerable.

In Metal Gear Solid, Hideo Kojima elevated this wonky design trope to the level of art in the boss fight against Psycho Mantis. Mantis would be unbeatable if you used a controller plugged into your Playstation's port one. To beat him, you had to switch ports and listen to him rant: "Why can't I read your miiiiind?"

Was this Kojima taking an excuse to troll players and comment upon difficulty through obscurity? Possibly, possibly not, hard to tell with that guy. Whatever the truth, Metal Gear Solid taught me something. The difference between an interesting tactical challenge and plain frustrating stupidity.

Stupid boss fights and bad signposting go hand in hand. R-Type style boss fights where shooting the exposed pulsing brain is just difficult are one thing. Boss fights you lose over and over because you have no idea what tactics to use are a painful, hellish misery.

I guess sometimes games developers lose sight of these things. Like the fact that if you don't leave a trail of breadcrumbs, players can become lost. After all, if all the usual stuff doesn't work then what are you supposed to do? The answer to your predicament could be literally anything at all. That way madness lies.

Alpha Protocol bills itself as the espionage RPG. That's all well and good, but the designers of the game never stopped to think about the implications. Some of the mechanics of your traditional RPG are not very stealthy, after all.

At first I was trying to be all ninja-esque. I sneaked past people to achieve objectives, not letting them know I was ever there. Then I realised, I was missing half the loot. Also the game appeared not to penalise the senseless waste of human life, rather it appeared to encourage it.

In a normal dungeon crawl, I would expect to kill everything and turn the dungeon upside down looking for loot. In an espionage game I would expect penalties for slaughtering every living soul on an airbase. I would expect rifling every drawer, safe and locker to raise eyebrows. After all, that's hardly inconspicuous.

Not to the designers of Alpha Protocol, however. You're on for the slaughter and you can loot away to your heart's content. It's an RPG that's a tiny bit espionage-y. This isn't cool, it's annoying. It's dumb. It's confusing. It's immersion breaking, if nothing else.

Another way that story design and level design can come to blows is demonstrated in Enslaved. The level designers have peppered the lush environments with little orange spheres to pick up. The people on orange sphere duty encourage exploration and appreciation of the 3D model work. Well done.

The character designers, on the other hand, have your companion Trip constantly berating you. "Over here", she cries out. "Hurry Up", "Let's go this way!"

Some times these developer guys should have a meeting about this stuff. "Do we want people to take a look around? Or to hurry up and get on with things?" They just need to decide.

This is one of the reasons I have come to prefer a well designed open world game. In a mission you might be pressed to leg it across the play area. In between missions, you can go for an explore and pick up collectibles. The best of both worlds. Not that open world designers always seem to understand this, of course. That's a gripe for another day.

The advantage of picking "Easy" mode to test out a game is that you will have clearer expectations. Frustration inducing elements are not supposed to be present. When you get a well designed easy mode like the one in Uncharted 2, you can appreciate the way the mechanics slot together.

When the edges and corners show through despite the attempt to give the player an easy ride, you know that it's the game design at fault. So next time you're unsure whether you have a skill gap, maybe it's time to disengage insane difficulty mode. Easy mode is a brilliant way to identify any rubbish mechanics that could be holding you back.


Have you spotted any game breaking flaws while playing with the training wheels on? Let us know in the comments below!

Tagged: video games.

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